Our CIO is pushing us to learn a programming language that no one has heard of. He used it in his old job. One looked into it and found that no company or government agency in my state used it. It doesn't appear in TIOBE Index. It doesn't appear in Stack Overflow's to programming language. My colleagues and I see this as a huge career limitation. What can we do about this?

I feel like the tech industry has completely warped my perception of money. I find myself getting jealous of people making $250k on Reddit, while completely forgetting that my current salary puts me in the top percentage of earners in my own zip code. My non-tech friends are struggling with groceries, and here I am complaining that my RSU refresher wasn't high enough this quarter. How do you ground yourself?

We need to stop the AI initiative. This is becoming a wrecking ball, and I only foresee getting worse. How can we make noise to put these types of software to its end?

I got dinged on my latest review for not participating enough in the team channels, and I feel like I’m back in middle school. Apparently, shipping clean, bug-free code ahead of schedule takes a backseat to not dropping enough memes in the #random channel. My manager literally told me that social presence is a core metric for our remote culture this year. Is this normal? I’m so grumpy about it.

I’m a 35-year-old in Seattle, and I’m genuinely terrified that I’m already becoming too old for this industry. I looked around our all-hands meeting yesterday and realized that except for upper management, almost everyone on the engineering team is fresh out of college age. They can pull all-nighters without blinking, while my back hurts if I sit in the wrong chair for two hours. Are we all just silently sliding toward an expiration date once we hit our late 30s? How do you stay relevant?